Our Project: To highlight how Library and Information Science Education is working with practioners to provide graduate students with practical experience.

Our expected outcomes:

1) A successful Education Forum to take place at the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, featuring the work of master's students in LIS programs.
This Emerging Leader group will work with Joe Sanchez to assist in the planning of the Education Forum, featuring the work of masters students, in Anaheim.

Note: As of 1/12/08, this group has decided to work to create a web resource for searching Practicum experiences. This resource will include links to resources regarding practicums, student's "stories" about their practicums, the responding LIS school's contact information, and possibly more.

Group members and their roles:

April Bocchino: Monitor the work of the team to make sure that each member contributes and completes assignments
Molly Krichten: Write up team's findings
Sarah Stohr: Update the wiki/blog with team progress each month
Stefanie Warlick: Keep in touch with the mentor and the ALA contact person
Valerie Wonder: Lead the poster project

Dr. Loriene Roy: Sponsor
Joe Sanchez: Mentor

Final Report:

In an attempt to identify methods and tools available to LIS students seeking practicum and internship opportunities, the ALA Emerging Leaders ’08 Group Y (LIS Education and Practical Experience) conducted exploratory inquiries to a number of ALA accredited LIS programs and distributed a formal survey of recent LIS graduates. Results of the overall findings will serve as recommendations submitted to the ALA leadership and are meant to determine the demand for a tool or service to meet the needs of LIS students and ultimately inform the content and features of an online resource.

Initially, information was solicited from selected ALA-accredited LIS programs regarding service models for connecting students with practicum and internship opportunities. As a follow up and method to gain further perspective, a formal survey was sent to the ALA Emerging Leaders '07 & '08 listservs. Survey categories and questions focused on LIS student participation in practicum and internships, support resources and services offered by LIS schools to pursue such opportunities, and solicitation of ideas for useful tools that ALA might create and offer to LIS students.

The research of ALA Emerging Leaders ’08 Group Y indicates:

Internships enhance the education of LIS students

Internships lead to the professional opportunities

LIS students have a need for increased information about internship opportunities

LIS programs have proprietary information on internship opportunities that they are sometimes unwilling to share

LIS students would use an internship database or information resource developed and maintained by ALA if one were available, current, and searchable

You can view the survey results from the ALA Emerging Leaders groups here.

Sources of information on Capstone/Fieldwork/Practicum opportunities:

From New Graduate to Competent Practitioner: Rethinking the
Architecture of Post-MLS Residency Programs in ARL Libraries.[1] Megan Z. Perez. April, 2007.
This is a Masters Paper written by a UNC Chapel Hill M.S. student. He focuses on post-MLS residency programs, this may be a bit out of our scope. However, we may be interested in including some/all of the programs he identifies in our searchable database. (Stefanie)